University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), like many libraries, recently migrated to a new knowledgebase and integrated library system (ILS) and found they had to clean up a great deal of messy serial title list data. In their search for solutions, they discovered the free, open source tool OpenRefine, a software program specifically designed for data normalization, transformation, and cleaning. This article describes the steps that UNCG used to take a publisher's title list file and transform it into a file format usable by their ILS. In doing so, this article will discuss major types of functionality in OpenRefine: downloading the software, importing data correctly, using the interface, transforming data on a column and cell level, exploring and normalizing data, and exporting files out of OpenRefine. At the end of this article, the readers should understand how to use OpenRefine on a basic level and be able to begin to use it on their own data.
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Kate Hill (2016) studied this question.